process_church

The process church of
the final judgment

From: http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/dossier/id275/pg1/

The Process Church of Tthe Final Judgment holds a special place
in occult lore. Supposedly borne of disaffected Scientologists and
later accused of being the inspiration for both the Manson family
and the Son Of Sam shootings, the Church faded from view in the 1970s.
Now however it is back where it belongs, on the World Wide Web alongside
every other crazy religion.

The Process Church combined community activism with a peculiar set
of beliefs: Jehovah, Christ, Satan and Lucifer were not enemies,
but all equal parts of Creation. These four personalities were all
venerated, though only the 'good guys' were truly worshipped at first.
Like many cults that formed in the late 1960s, the Processeans depended
on both youthful enthusiasm and cultish practices of separation,
unquestioned beliefs that they were the chosen ones, and an apocalyptic
worldview. The Church's use of Scientology 'techniques' in order
to determine the subconscious drives of members (drives personified
by the four archetypes), and its misuse of Alfred Adler's view of
the subconscious, helped keep members in line while 'The Teacher'
Robert DeGrimston and 'The Oracle' Mary Anne Maclean waited for the
end of the world. The world didn't end, but the 1960s did, with the
Manson murders. Manson was originally associated with the Process
by several writers (he contributed a meditation on Death to a Process
newsletter), most notably in The Family: The Manson Group And Its
Aftermath (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1971), a book about Manson written
by Ed Sanders, and now available in a revised form as The Family:
The Story Of Charles Manson's Dune Buggy Attack Battalion (New York:
Panther, 1973).

By the early 1970s, the group was beginning to collapse in on itself.
DeGrimston's increasing fascination with group sex, a neo-military
social hierarchy and the increasing importance of Satan in his writings,
alienated many unsuspecting Processeans, and Satan really made fundraising
difficult as well. Predictably, it was DeGrimston's exploration of
Satanic/Luciferian archetypes which attracted the most interest from
critics, although Processean philosophy was closer to the Jesus Freak
phenomena than neo-religious Satanic institutions like the Church
of Satan or Temple of Set. The best scholarly study of this period
is Satan's Power: A Deviant Psychotherapy Cult by William Sims Bainbridge
(Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1978).

DeGrimston was ousted and a new group arose from the ashes. The
Founders kept going until the late 1970s, but were little more than
a newsletter. The David Berkowitz slayings of 1977 didn't help the
splinter group, as both the Process and a supposed Satanic fringe
group were implicated in the murders. This worldview was widely promoted
by Maury Terry's The Ultimate Evil: The Truth About the Cult Murders:
Son of Sam & Beyond (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1999), a sensationalistic
book written at the height of the Satanic Ritual Abuse rumour panic
in 1987, and later released in a revised edition. Terry was succesfully
sued by the Solar Lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) for being
erroneously linked to David Berkowitz and Charles Manson.

There is no evidence that The Process had anything to do with David
Berkowitz or the Son Of Sam murders, outside of Berkowitz's own confused
and contradictory testimony.

Today, the Church is back, as the largely secular Society Of Processeans.
Interest in the group has been bouyed by magician Genesis P-Orridge's
sampling of DeGrimston in the Psychic TV classic track 'Smile",
which enabled Processean aesthetics to subtly infiltrate the Industrial
subculture. The Society Of Processeans group is secular (having swept
Satan under the rug), but still quotes DeGrimston liberally. Their
projects include Safe Houses for battered women and Retrieval Networks
which solicit donations from official nonprofits. This may sound
good at first, but some hallmarks of a cult are isolating vulnerable
people from the world at large, and depending on the "comfort
of strangers."